The present invention relates to system and method of producing a simulated oil painting and, more particularly, to a system and method that produces a picture having three dimensional brush strokes on a substrate, such as a canvas, to simulate authentic brush strokes in the particular picture.
Obviously, there is real market for original oil paintings created by an artist, and, depending of course upon the skill and artistry of the creator, such oil paintings can be valuable paintings to the owner. Unfortunately, such original oil paintings, such as portraits, for example, require considerable time to produce and a quality portrait can take time in the order of months to create an original portrait of a person and are therefore considerably costly as well as time consuming to the subject being painted. Certainly, such original works of art are well beyond the means of most persons.
One of the more recognizable features or characteristics of an original oil painting is the three dimensional effect that is created by the artist as the oil paint is applied, that is, the oil paint is actually raised from the flat surface of the canvas in the configuration of the original brush strokes of the artist and those brush strokes are artistically selected and applied by the artist both for color as well as quantity of the paint that is applied to the canvas to bring about a three dimensional effect created by the actual application of the paint to that canvas and which produces the artistic impression desired by the painter.
Accordingly, in order to produce a simulation of an original oil painting, one of the factors is to produce the simulation of the brush stroke effect so that the ultimate product has three dimensional brush strokes that are oriented, to the extent possible, in accordance with actual brush strokes that would be applied by an artist making an original creation.
Currently, there are various techniques that are used in order to produce a simulated oil painting, that is, to create a picture, such as a portrait, landscape or the like, by some mechanical/manual means where the final product has a three dimensional appearance with brush strokes that simulate the real painters brush strokes that would be applied by an artist creating a original oil painting.
One of such current techniques is to produce a portrait or landscape size picture by the use of commercially available painting software packages to produce, from a snapshot or other picture of the desired subject, a picture of the desired size that can be produced by a commercially available printer onto a canvas that has brush strokes that are created by means of the software package. A typical software package that can be used to produce electronically simulated brush strokes in a digitally stored picture is Painter 7™ by the Procreate Division of Corel, Inc.
With such software, the digitized pictures are simply enhanced by adding brush strokes electronically by a palette and an electronic stylus or directly on a computer screen or tablet and the picture so produced can be printed out by means of an ink jet printer to produce a picture that shows brush strokes added by the software program to make the picture look more like an original oil painting. While the brush strokes do enhance the look of the picture, the pictures so created are still two dimensional so that an additional step or steps are required to create a three dimensional effect that is more desirable and more akin to the look of an authentic oil painting.
According, one method of creating the three dimensional effect to the two dimensional computer generated print having brush strokes is to first cover the print with a protective coating. Thereafter, the picture is converted from a two dimensional picture to a three dimensional simulated oil painting by manually applying, by a brush, a gel that dries to a transparent state and which actually stands out from the canvas to give a three dimensional appearance to the picture and which therefore simulates an original oil painting having actual brush strokes. Unfortunately, the aforedescribed step of applying a gel does not necessarily create brush strokes that are aligned with the brush strokes that are simulated by the computer or which would be synchronized or registered with the strokes that would actually be applied by an artist in creating that work. In addition, the aforedescribed technique requires the manual application of the gel to the picture and therefore would be difficult to adapt to automated systems.
As such, therefore, while the aforedescribed technique produces a good simulated oil painting, it would be advantageous to have a system and method of creating a simulated oil painting having three dimensional brush strokes where the actual raised brush strokes more closely are registered or aligned with brush strokes created electronically by the software program so as to better simulate the raised brush strokes that would be created by an artist creating an original work. In other words, it would be advantageous to have a system and method where the actual electronically applied brush strokes themselves could be raised to provide the three dimensional effect rather than relying upon the manual application of a transparent gel that may or may not accurately follow those electronically created brush strokes.
It would be further advantageous to have a system and method of producing simulated oil painting that could be carried out by mechanical and electronic systems and therefore susceptible to a fully automated system approach to the production of the final product by eliminating the need to manually apply the raised portions of the ultimate painting.